Better Dead Than Addicted? Maine's Governor Vetoes A Lifesaving Bill

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (A.P. Photo/Robert F. Bukaty )

This week Maine Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bill that would have allowed pharmacists to dispense the opioid antagonist naloxone (a.k.a. Narcan), which reverses heroin overdoses that might otherwise be fatal, without a prescription. The Maine legislature unanimously approved the bill, which copies the policy of about 30 other states, because making naloxone more easily available is a commonsense harm reduction measure that can save the lives of heroin users who are not ready to stop using the drug. As far as LePage is concerned, that is precisely the problem:

Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose. Creating a situation where an addict has a heroin needle in one hand and a shot of naloxone in the other produces a sense of normalcy and security around heroin use that serves only to perpetuate the cycle of addiction.

In other words, if the aim is discouraging heroin use, making the habit less deadly is counterproductive. More generally, prohibitionists want drugs to be as dangerous as possible, the better to deter consumption. Although LePage states that appalling argument more explicitly than most drug warriors do, it is fundamental to the way prohibition works.

There is nothing inherently deadly about heroin. People can consume it regularly for years without suffering any serious bodily damage, provided they follow sanitary injection practices, take appropriate doses, and do not mix it with other depressants. Prohibition makes heroin needlessly dangerous by encouraging injection (the most efficient method to consume an artificially expensive drug), making clean needles hard to come by and risky to possess (by treating them as illegal drug paraphernalia), creating a black market in which purity and potency areunpredictable, and discouraging honest advice about how to minimize the drug’s hazards.

Although such harm-amplifying effects are usually described as unintended consequences of prohibition, LePage’s attitude toward naloxone shows that from his perspective they are desirable. The same impulse underlies opposition to needle exchange programs, supervised injection rooms, and prescriptions of pharmaceutical-quality heroin to addicts. Like readily available naloxone, these measures make addicts less likely to die, possibly at the cost of making them less likely to quit. LePage considers that risk unacceptable. Better dead than addicted.